CHAPTER XXIV.

FIRE IN SONORA--RAPID PROGRESS OF THE FIRE, AND TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF THE TOWN--THE BURNED-OUT INHABITANTS--DEATHS BY FIRE--REBUILDING OF THE TOWN.

While I was in Sonora, the entire town, with the greater part of the property it contained, was utterly annihilated by fire.

It was about one o’clock in the morning when the fire broke out. I happened to be awake at the time, and at the first alarm I jumped up, and, looking out of my window, I saw a house a short distance up the street on the other side completely enveloped in flames. The street was lighted up as bright as day, and was already alive with people hurriedly removing whatever articles they could from their houses before the fire seized upon them.

I ran down stairs to lend a hand to clear the house, and in the bar-room I found the landlady, _en deshabille_, walking frantically up and down, and putting her hand to her head as though she meant to tear all her hair out by the roots. She had sense enough left, however, not to do so. A waiter was there also, with just as little of his wits about him; he was chattering fiercely, sacréing very freely, and knocking the chairs and tables about in a wild manner, but not making a direct attempt to save anything. It was ridiculous to see them throwing away so much bodily exertion for nothing, when there was so much to be done, so I set the example by opening the door, and carrying out whatever was nearest. The other inmates of the house soon made their appearance, and we succeeded in gutting the bar-room of everything movable, down to the bar furniture, among which was a bottle labelled “Ouisqui.”

We could save little else, however, for already the fire had reached us. The house was above a hundred yards from where the fire broke out, but from the first alarm till it was in flames scarcely ten minutes elapsed. The fire spread with equal rapidity in the other direction. An attempt was made to save the upper part of the town by tearing down a number of houses some distance in advance of the flames; but it was impossible to remove the combustible materials of which they were composed, and the fire suffered no check in its progress, devouring the demolished houses as voraciously in that state as though they had been left entire.

On the hills, between which lay the town, were crowds of the unfortunate inhabitants, many of whom were but half dressed, and had barely escaped with their lives. One man told me he had been obliged to run for it, and had not even time to take his gold watch from under his pillow.

Those whose houses were so far distant from the origin of the fire as to enable them to do so, had carried out all their movable property, and were sitting among heaps of goods and furniture, confusedly thrown together, watching grimly the destruction of their houses. The whole hill-side was lighted up as brightly as a well-lighted room, and the surrounding landscape was distinctly seen by the blaze of the burning town, the hills standing brightly out from the deep black of the horizon, while overhead the glare of the fire was reflected by the smoky atmosphere.

It was a most magnificent sight, and, more than any fire I had ever witnessed, it impressed one with the awful power and fury of the destroying element. It was not like a fire in a city where man contends with it for the victory, and where one can mark the varied fortunes of the battle as the flames become gradually more feeble under the efforts of the firemen, or again gain the advantage as they reach some easier prey; but here there were no such fluctuations in the prospects of the doomed city--it lay helplessly waiting its fate, for water there was none, and no resistance could be offered to the raging flames, which burned their way steadily up the street, throwing over the houses which still remained intact the flush of supernatural beauty which precedes dissolution, and leaving the ground already passed over covered with the gradually blackening and falling remains of those whose spirit had already departed.

There was an occasional flash and loud explosion, caused by the quantities of powder in some of the stores, and a continual discharge of firearms was heard above the roaring of the flames, from the numbers of loaded revolvers which had been left to their fate along with more valuable property. The most extraordinary sight was when the fire got firm hold of a Jew’s slop-shop; there was then a perfect whirlwind of flame, in which coats, shirts, and blankets were carried up fifty or sixty feet in the air, and became dissolved into a thousand sparkling atoms.

Among the crowds of people on the hill-side there was little of the distress and excitement one might have expected to see on such an occasion. The houses and stores had been gutted as far as practicable of the property they contained, and all that it was possible to do to save any part of the town had already been attempted, but the hopelessness of such attempts was perfectly evident.

The greater part of the people, it is true, were individuals whose wealth was safe in their buckskin purses, and to them the pleasure of beholding such a grand pyrotechnic display was unalloyed by any greater individual misfortune than the loss of a few articles of clothing; but even those who were sitting hatless and shoeless among the wreck of their property showed little sign of being at all cast down by their disaster; they had more the air of determined men, waiting for the fire to play out its hand before they again set to work to repair all the destruction it had caused.

The fire commenced about half-past one o’clock in the morning, and by three o’clock it had almost burned itself out. Darkness again prevailed, and when day dawned, the whole city of Sonora had been removed from the face of the earth. The ground on which it had stood, now white with ashes, was covered with still smouldering fragments, and the only objects left standing were three large safes belonging to different banking and express companies, with a small remnant of the walls of an adobe house.

People now began to venture down upon the still smoking site of the city, and, seeing an excitement among them at the lower end of the town, I went down to see what was going on. The atmosphere was smoky and stifling, and the ground was almost too hot to stand on. The crowd was collected on a place which was known to be very rich, as the ground behind the houses had been worked, and a large amount of gold having been there extracted, it was consequently presumed that under the houses equally good diggings would be found. During the fire, miners had flocked in from all quarters, and among them were some unprincipled vagabonds, who were now endeavouring to take up mining claims on the ground where the houses had stood, measuring off the regular number of feet allowed to each man, and driving in stakes to mark out their claims in the usual manner.

The owners of the houses, however, were “on hand,” prepared to defend their rights to the utmost. Men who had just seen the greater part of their property destroyed were not likely to relinquish very readily what little still remained to them; and now, armed with pistols, guns, and knives, their eyes bloodshot and their faces scorched and blackened, they were tearing up the stakes as fast as the miners drove them in, while they declared very emphatically, with all sorts of oaths, that any man who dared to put a pick into that ground would not live half a minute. And truly a threat from such men was one not to be disregarded.

By the laws of the mines, the diggings under a man’s house are his property, and the law being on their side, the people would have assisted them in defending their rights; and it would not have been absolutely necessary for them to take the trouble of shooting the miscreants, who, as other miners began to assemble on the ground, attracted by the row, found themselves so heartily denounced that they thought it advisable to sneak off as fast as possible.

The only buildings left standing after the fire were a Catholic and a Wesleyan church, which stood on the hill a little off the street, and also a large building which had been erected for a ball-room, or some other public purpose. The proprietor of the principal gambling saloon, as soon as the fire broke out and he saw that there was no hope for his house, immediately made arrangements for occupying this room, which, from its isolated position, seemed safe enough; and into this place he succeeded in moving the greater part of his furniture, mirrors, chandeliers, and so on. The large sign in front of the house was also removed to the new quarters, and the morning after the fire--but an hour or two after the town had been burned down--the new saloon was in full operation. The same gamblers were sitting at the same tables, dealing monte and faro to crowds of betters; the piano and violin, which had been interrupted by the fire, were now enlivening the people in their distress; and the bar-keeper was as composedly as ever mixing cocktails for the thirsty throats of the million.

No time was lost by the rest of the population. The hot and smoky ground was alive with men clearing away rubbish; others were in the woods cutting down trees and getting out posts and brushwood, or procuring canvass and other supplies from the neighbouring camps.

In the afternoon the Phœnix began to rise. Amid the crowds of workers on the long blackened tract of ground which had been the street, posts began here and there to spring up; presently cross pieces connected them; and before one could look round, the framework was filled in with brushwood. As the ground became sufficiently cool, people began to move down their goods and furniture to where their houses had been, where those who were not yet erecting either a canvass or a brush house, built themselves a sort of pen of boxes and casks of merchandise.

The fire originated in a French hotel, and among the ashes of this house were found the remains of a human body. There was merely the head and trunk, the limbs being entirely burned off. It looked like a charred and blackened log of wood, but the contour of the head and figure was preserved; and it would be hard to conceive anything more painfully expressive of intense agony than the few lines which so powerfully indicated what had been the contorted position of the head, neck, and shoulders of the unfortunate man when he ceased to move. The coroner held an inquest as soon as he could raise a jury out of the crowd, and in the afternoon the body was followed to the grave by several hundred Frenchmen.

This was the only death from the fire which was discovered at the time, but among the ruins of an adobe house, which for some reason was not rebuilt for several weeks afterwards, the remains of another body were found, and were never identified.

As for living on that day, one had to do the best one could with raw materials. Every man had to attend to his own commissariat; and when it was time to think about dinner, I went foraging with a friend among the promiscuous heaps of merchandise, and succeeded in getting some boxes of sardines and a bottle of wine. We were also fortunate enough to find some hard bread, so we did not fare very badly; and at night we lay down on the bare hill-side, and shared that vast apartment with two or three thousand fellow-lodgers. Happy was the man who had saved his blankets,--mine had gone as a small contribution to the general conflagration; but though the nights were agreeably cool, the want of a covering, even in the open air, was not a very great hardship.

The next day the growth of the town was still more rapid. All sorts of temporary contrivances were erected by the storekeepers and hotel-keepers on the sites of their former houses. Every man was anxious to let the public see that he was “on hand,” and carrying on business as before. Sign-painters had been hard at work all night, and now huge signs on yard-wide strips of cotton cloth lined each side of the street, in many cases being merely laid upon the ground, where as yet nothing had been erected whereon to display them. These canvass and brush houses were only temporary. Every one, as soon as lumber could be procured, set to work to build a better house than the one he had lost; and within a month Sonora was in all respects a finer town than it had been before the fire.